The protagonist’s ethnic background has been cause for debate since the book’s publication. Joseph Heller was frequently asked about Yossarian’s ethnicity and religion. Additionally, the sociopathic Milo Minderbinder was designed with Heller’s childhood friend, Marvin “Beansy” Winkler of Coney Island, in mind. Yossarian’s name came from fellow WWII veteran Francis Yohannan. Heller was a veteran of World War II, and he based a number of Catch-22’s characters on his army buddies.

4.Many of Catch-22’s characters were based on Joseph Heller’s friends. Acquiescing to his publisher’s qualms about confusion with the WWII novel Mila 18, Heller dragged his title through a sequence of changes: Catch-11 (which was deemed too similar to the contemporary film Ocean’s 11), possibly followed by Catch-17 (which posed the same problem with Billy Wilder’s war movie Stalag 17), and then Catch-14 (which Heller’s editor thought just didn’t sound funny enough). The original title of the story, as published in New World Writing, was Catch-18. Joseph Heller went through four numbers for the book’s title before landing on 22.

He submitted the chapter to New World Writing magazine by way of a literary agent, and a full year passed before he completed a second chapter. He spent the workday following his creative epiphany, writing out the entire first chapter of what would become Catch-22 by hand. Heller was an advertising copywriter when he had the idea for the novel. Joseph Heller wrote the first chapter of Catch-22 at work the following day. Over the course of an hour and a half, he developed the basic plot and collection of characters that he’d ultimately pour into his novel. The first time he saw the chaplain, ‘Someone’ fell madly in love with him,” with “he” and “someone” holding the place for Heller’s protagonist’s eventual name, Yossarian. While lying in bed in his apartment on the West Side of Manhattan in the early 1950s, Heller was struck with what would become the iconic opening line of the story: “It was love at first sight. Heller recalled the birth of his most famous novel as if it were a classic movie scene. Joseph Heller sketched out Catch-22’s concept and characters in about 90 minutes. Here are a few interesting bits of information about both how Heller’s story came to be and the legacy that it left behind.

Joseph Heller’s 1961 war comedy Catch-22 is one of the most beloved novels of the 20th century, not to mention one of the funniest.

Joseph heller novels